Teens Need a Psychological Moratorium

She remembered psychologist Erik Erickson's exhortation about teenagers: they need a "psychosocial moratorium," he wrote, an environment and a stretch of time in which they can explore different aspects of their personality and try on a series of identities without fear of consequence. In a way, that was what school was supposed to offer, but it didn't always do so with much success. She realized that this was exactly what virtual worlds offered all the time, to anyone with a computer and an ...

 Why Kids Abandon Creative Play

The observation that play gets short shrift as children come of age in the Western world is surely as old and as perennial as that civilization itself. The Bible puts it thus: "When I was a child, I spake as a child, I felt as a child, I thought as a child: now that 1 am become a man, I have put away childish things." Turning their attention to the phenomenon, psychologists have asked what might be the causal factors. In the early 1900s, for instance, G. Stanley Hall argued that as children...

 Studies on Secular Parenting

The results of such secular child-rearing are encouraging. Studies have found that secular teenagers are far less likely to care what the “cool kids” think, or express a need to fit in with them, than their religious peers. When these teens mature into “godless” adults, they exhibit less racism than their religious counterparts, according to a 2010 Duke University study. Many psychological studies show that secular grownups tend to be less vengeful, less nationalistic, less militarist...

 How Brains Respond to Positive/Negative Feedback in Child...

In children up to eight or nine years old, the dopamine-modulating reward center in the nucleus accumbens reacts strongly to positive feedback (activating the prefrontal cortex) and minimally to negative feedback. In older children, increased activation still occurs in the PFC when dopamine is released in response to positive feedback (particularly in response to correct answers/ predictions). However, the greatest age-related change is the higher reactivity of the NAc to negative feedback an...